Environment and Society presents, as part of its occasional series…
Emily Wakild (Department of History, Boise State University), “The Saga of the Saca: What Debates Over Vicuña Culling Teach Us About Conservation in South America”
Thursday October 17, 2013, 5:15-6:30pm
Henry Angus Building, Room 234
Animal conservation efforts in South America have successfully saved from extinction species like the vicuña, the llama’s wild cousin. But protection is hardly a straightforward affair. Beginning in 1966, Peru’s vicuña experiment may have been the world’s first community-based conservation effort and it increased the animal’s population fortyfold in a decade. Proposals to then manage the population and sell vicuña wool devolved into a personal rivalry and international controversy that reveals the ways in which biology, socio-economic priorities, and politics tightly wrap non-human species in an interdependent matrix. Examining these debates provides a more expansive history of resource management in the developing world.
Future talks:
October 23, 2013, 5:15-6:30: Anna Stens (Umeå University, Sweden), “Intensive forestry as progress or decay? 50 years of environmental debate in Sweden” (Angus 350 – note this talk is on a Wednesday)
For more details, contact wynn@geog.ubc.ca